


all your colours gone to grey

by aldiara



Category: Harlots (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Literary References & Allusions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 15:55:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20659817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aldiara/pseuds/aldiara
Summary: The wake is done. All the poison’s spat, all the tears are shed and all the guests are gone.





	all your colours gone to grey

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through S03E04. I felt the show rather short-changed Isabella on dealing with her feelings after Charlotte’s death, so here’s my super-emo take on that. I’ve deliberately borrowed elements from Arwen Undómiel’s vigil by Aragorn’s grave, because Liv did such an amazing job with both of those characters and I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose their responses to this kind of grief.
> 
> Thanks to my lovely beta Alsha!

***

The wake is done. All the poison’s spat, all the tears are shed and all the guests are gone.

I am alone, but for your corpse. Cool marble skin amongst heaps of wilting flowers, all your colours gone to grey. I imagine you are wilting too, inside, the fluids of life turning sweetly foul in small increments of decay. I don’t know how long it takes a body to go to rot. You’re beautiful yet, if colourless. You don’t yet smell.

I haven’t touched you. Not since the night you died, your hand tucked warmly into the crook of my arm; not since you left me, smiling, fingers sliding out of mine, to have a word with… I don’t recall who. Him, I suppose; the cretin you were fucking. I don’t truly care. I never needed you to be mine alone. One does not demand exclusivity from the morning star.

In private, the last time we touched was the morning of the boxing match. Our last morning. (I wonder if I will think of all our time like this now, rolling back the days and weeks and months in this new context of desolation: This is the last time we did that. The last time we were like this. All of our moments, a chronicle of lasts.)

You pulled me back into bed that morning with the sweet urgency that marked all our love-making, tussled me, laughing, down among the tangled sheets. I did not know, before you, that it was possible to laugh during the act. I know, such a simple thing seems hardly worthy of revelation, but it was, to me. In everything we did, your mouth never lingered far from the warm curve of mirth. You’d giggle, groping like a schoolgirl; you’d gasp and curse with breathless laughter in the midst of climax; you’d raise your eyes to look at me with a sultry smile before you’d press that soft mouth into me and drink me down like honeyed mead.

You made me touchable. I spent the last two decades like a book behind glass, my cautionary tale preserved in a stasis of defilement. You broke the lock. You dusted off my cover. You opened up the pages with the easy lack of judgement of one to whom no depth of depravity comes as a surprise. My scholar of debauchery, you spread your fingers on that starved parchment, broke off the seals of shame my brother had imprinted there, and set me free. You wanted the whole tale, stains and all, and flinched from no sordid detail; in your smoke-burnished voice, the annals of my life became beautiful and brave, a record of survival. You read me plain, offering sympathy and joy, but never pity, and scrawled on every page of me an annotation of defiance. 

The undertakers will come in the morning, to take away your shell. I cannot stay in the room with you, and I cannot stay away; I wander the long corridors of my own house and return, again and again, to your bier: trailing my fingers along the marble, touching the crumbling petals. I don’t believe in ghosts, but perhaps I will haunt you, just for a little while, wherever you have gone. Just long enough to touch you one more time, feel once again the live heat of your palms against mine. Long enough so perhaps I can wake, and cry, and then live on.

During one of my circuits through the night-dark house, I have the strangest urge to go to my bedroom, tear my robe into disarray, and frig myself to exhaustion. You made me do that, once, while you watched. After the initial squirm of embarrassment, your eyes on my naked flesh set me on fire as surely as your touch. You played with your breasts as you gazed on, murmuring soft encouragement, the filthiest things in that voice as sweet as dark honey, and I spent three times. I want to do that now – want to put you back in that corner armchair in my mind’s eye, fill the shadows with your face, and drive down on my fingers to exorcise the tendril of rage so unbecoming to a lover’s grief: Why this way? What drove you to such end, and what has _he_ to do with it – a lowly pimp, a nothing scoundrel? Why was I not enough? If you needed prick so badly, you need have only told me: I would have worn a cockpiece large enough to drive all others from your mind, and ridden you till you collapsed; I would have fit my fist inside of you and fucked you tenderly, fucked you without mercy, fucked you blind.

I still my steps in an empty hall and realise my fists are clenched, as if poised to see through the threat. I loosen them, and rage rolls off me like rain off heavy velvet, leaving only tired sorrow. 

I don’t, in the end, go to my room. I drift back towards the room where you lie – where something lies that no longer has you in it. I don’t approach, this time. I find a chair and drag it to a moon-bright window at the far end of the room. I cannot sleep or cry or fuck, but I can sit here keeping watch over this pallid remnant. Your shabby souteneur can’t do that, nor can your family, united in their grief. This place, at least, is mine alone.

I will stay touchable, I think. I will not go back into that dusty case, nor will I linger on in darkness and in doubt. This story is mine now, and you have splattered it with raucous colour, made it scandalous with joy. I will not give that up. I will flounder in the absence of your light, my gutter beauty, but I will be my own star if I must.

But, love, how I will miss you.


End file.
